Alpha marks the highly anticipated return of award-winning French filmmaker Julia Ducournau, who has made waves with her past movies Raw and Titane and earned herself a reputation as an exciting voice in the body horror genre.
But Alpha marks something of a departure for the 41-year-old writer-director into broader and more painful territory.
Set in an alternate 1980s/90s timeline, the movie begins as rebellious 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) is tattooed with a shared needle at a party, putting her at risk of infection from a terrifying bloodborne disease that slowly, and incredibly painfully, turns humans to marble.
Her doctor mother (Golshifteh Farahani) is terrified that the same fate awaits her daughter as that which has already befallen her infected heroin addict brother, Amin, a charismatic but erratic and somewhat dangerous presence in their lives.
Actor Tahar Rahim, who plays Amin, tells Metro that it felt ‘as if we’d known each other for years’ of his first film with Ducournau, as they forged a very close relationship for the movie.
This is of paramount importance to Ducournau, who describes Rahim as ‘one of the best actors of his generation’. He has previously been nominated for Baftas for his performances in A Prophet (2009) and The Mauritanian (2021), while also appearing in Sir Ridley Scott’s Napoleon and superhero flick Madame Web.
They are both in town for Alpha’s special screening at London Film Festival.
‘When you ask an actor to give so much of their person – physically, psychologically, emotionally – you know that you’re going to have to give them your all, also. They [are] granted permanent access, 100%, to who you are. And I felt very comfortable for Tahar to know who I was, from the get-go,’ she says.
Many have interpreted Alpha as an allegory for AIDS, with the movie showing an unspecified disease that could be transmitted through needles and sex and its victims being ostracised and shamed by the community.
The disease I want to talk about within the film is fear
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But Ducournau rejects that, citing that such a reading would put AIDS at the heart of the movie– and it’s not, she argues.
‘I think that’s missing the point, in the sense that if I had to make a movie about AIDS, naming it and showing the symptoms and really treating this disease as the centre point of the film, I would have done a completely different film – probably a way more historically accurate film as well,’ the writer-director suggests.
‘The disease I want to talk about within the film is fear and how it’s transmitted to further generations once a trauma hasn’t been resolved,’ she adds.
But she can understand the assumption and confirms it was an influence in the writing of the film, as someone born in the 1980s to doctor parents herself.
‘The way society treats the patient within my film is 100% what I perceived at the time, and which I still perceive, to be honest – because even if medicine has made many steps forwards, the social stigma is still very present.’
Actor Tahar Rahim’s struggle with body dysmorphia after dramatic transformation
To play addict Amin, whose actions – including multiple overdoses – have torn apart his family, Rahim lost over 40 pounds.
He was surrounded by a medical team as he embarked on the dramatic transformation during his preparation, which also included volunteering at an addiction treatment centre and distributing sterile gear on the streets.
But he admits it went beyond being only a physical journey and instead became ‘more of a character matter, almost a spiritual matter’.
‘That’s when it’s dangerous, because you’re just at the edge of something. There’s a cliff and all you want to do is just jump – and that’s where I realised that I was spot-on because that’s what’s happening with addicts, they play with death and life,’ he reveals.
Ducournau chimes in here with her own memory of how it consumed Rahim.
‘I remember distinctly a moment during the shoot where you were very worried that you hadn’t done enough, you couldn’t show [the weight loss], and he would constantly [ask] me, “But can you tell?”’ the filmmaker shares, describing Rahim as ‘extremely skinny at the time’.
‘I could feel that for you it was almost never enough,’ she adds, before Rahim admits: ‘I couldn’t see it. It changed my perception – and there’s a word for that [body dysmorphia].’
‘You said you couldn’t see yourself,’ remembers Ducournau.
‘Exactly – in the right way, as I was,’ the actor confirms.
The search for 13-year-old Alpha
Alpha, which also co-stars British-French actors Emma Mackey and Finnegan Oldfield, features newcomer Mélissa Boros in the titular role, as the niece of Rahim’s character Amin, who is alarmed to see him back in the lives of her and her long-suffering mother.
Doucournau had a specific brief for the part of Alpha as, while she is 13 in the film, the director knew she wanted to work with an adult actress.
‘The film was too dark. We were talking about a pandemic and that the virus in the film could be shared through sex and IV usage: I knew that even though there is no nudity, there would be scenes of close proximity between her and her partner, played by Louai El Amrousy, and I really didn’t feel like shooting this with someone who was young, for either of them,’ Ducournau clarifies.
She organised a casting of women 18 and older who looked significantly younger, focusing on ballerinas, swimmers, athletes and petite women, which is how she met Boros.
‘There’s something extremely funny and endearing in the teenage years, because it’s a way of physical mutation where your body is completely out of control and kind of like works on its own. And in real life, Melissa has this relationship to her body, which is extremely quirky and awkward and adorable,’ she adds.
Boros was 19 when Alpha was filmed but reads onscreen utterly convincingly as years younger.
Body horror ‘sounds misleading’, says director Julia Ducournau
Ducournau’s mention of mutation leads onto a discussion of ‘body horror’, a description her previous films have attracted, with her 2016 debut Raw about a vegan vet student who develops cannibalistic urges, and 2021’s Titane following a murderous model with a titanium plate in her head who has sex with a car.
Alpha has faced the same categorisation, although it plays as more of a psychological drama. There is still a strong element of body horror though, with some gruesome suffering and scenes of splintering as bodies turn to stone.
But Ducournau rejects this description of her movies – ‘I embrace no labels whatsoever, whatever they are’.
‘I always thought of my films just as dramatic, personal stories, seen from within. And I think that whether it’s within our bodies or within our own humanity, the horrors are very present, and they’re even magnified if you see them from the inside the way I do that.’
She ‘believes in mutation very much’ but sees her work as inspired by many different types of genre.
‘I really like the word ‘hybrid’. I like the word ‘mutant’. ‘Body horror’ sounds also kind of misleading, in ways that nowadays it’s always associated with a gorefest. And I really believe that actually the study of the body is something that is so much more existentialist and philosophical than this,’ she argues.
After winning the Palme D’Or, Cannes Film Festival’s highest honour, with Titane in 2021, Alpha premiered to a more mixed reaction there earlier this year. It was dismissed as ‘bewildering’ by The Guardian in a one-star review and called ‘an unrewarding slog’ by The New Yorker, while other publications contrastingly praised its emotional depth and The Times admired Ducournau for telling a story that ‘hums with imagination’.
She isn’t bothered by backlash to Alpha, which also included walkouts at Cannes.
‘The way I express myself is polarising, the way the hybrids that come out of me that are my films are polarising – and thank God! I’m here to shake up the dialogue, to shake up the thoughts. I’m here to raise questions, I’m not here to give answers,’ she states firmly.
‘I think answers might be comfortable, but I don’t believe that art is what it’s for at all,’ she adds, instead choosing to examine humanity, morality and raise big questions.
And Titane ‘polarised a lot at the time’, she points out. ‘But because it got the Palme d’Or, it seems that kind of was forgotten. And it’s not that… I don’t take any pride [in] that, in the sense that it’s very natural to me, and I understand that that’s the result of the way I express myself.’
For Ducournau, the movies and pieces of art that she ‘loved the most are the ones that I did not right away have a clear view of’.
‘There are always works of art that I had to go back to, in order to understand what called to me from within them when I first watched them. And that’s what I like, as an audience member myself.’
Alpha releases in UK cinemas on Friday, November 14.
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